Boys Will Be Boys...

This is a picture I took in our Brier kitchen after Damien babysat Jack for a few hours. The fact that he was covered in chalk and dirt was how we knew he had a good time. So the past two days have been pretty nice, having Aaron around all day Monday was a rare treat. Even still, I'm finding that my tank gets down to empty pretty quickly these days. I think that sleep deprivation is the cruelest torture ever; when I'm under-slept, even good days are hard. My other major struggle right now is resigning myself to the fact that no matter how well-behaved they are, two year-olds are messy. Really messy. It gets really old cleaning up the same messes ten times a day so sometimes I try leaving it alone until Jack is in bed, but on days when we stay home all day the mess really bugs me. If I have to be in the house all day, I'd like it to be clean. His fever is all gone but his nose is still runny and he has an awful cough, so I haven't taken him to any of the indoor play spaces I've been discovering so as not to spread germs. We really need to unpack so we can use the basement as a play space, as opposed to hauling all of our favorite play things into the living room. I briefly considered making a rule that all the toys stay in Jack's room, but decided that was stupid because it's Jack's living room too, and he likes to do his living with a lot of toys. I have started making him clean up one activity before getting another out, but the rules are kind of hard to enforce when I have Matteas in my arms most of the time. It helps that most of the time Jack's not malicious about his mess-making, he's just doing what makes sense to him. He's in that "what will happen if I do this?" stage, and I don't think I have enough safe, contained ways for him to conduct his experiments. It's nice that his face is so transparent, so I can always tell if he knows he did something he wasn't supposed to or if he's just having a good time. One of my favorite Jack faces is the "I can't believe how cool this is!" face, when his eyebrows shoot up to his hairline and his eyes get so wide I can count his eyelashes. It makes it awfully hard to be serious if he's just done something disastrous, like the other night when he was in the bath and I heard him hop out and close the door. He never closes the bathroom door, so I became concerned. I got up off the couch and walked down the hall to the bathroom, which was all the time he needed to squat down and poop on the floor. When he saw me open the door he panicked, grabbed his pile of poop nuggets and threw them hastily into the toilet, as if hoping to destroy the evidence. We had never really discussed if pooping on the bathroom floor was allowed or not, and since the urge had struck while he was in the tub he wasn't wearing a diaper, which wasn't his fault. Aaron and I decided that if he's aware enough to get out of the tub and put things by hand into the toilet, he's ready for potty training. Aaron set up his potty chair in the bathroom and today he told me he had to pee, so we took off his diaper and he hopped onto his potty chair and peed like that's how he always does it. I'm a little apprehensive about how this stage is going to go, since I've always felt that new babies and big-kid poop don't really mix. Still, I do really appreciate his boy-ness most of the time, and even though it's loud and messy and deaf I wouldn't change him even if I could. At least not while he's only two.